


The Summit of Hope

by easorian (barronblack)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-07 12:51:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3174218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barronblack/pseuds/easorian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Anders receives the news he’d given up dreaming of, then travels to Skyhold with Hawke. A strange boy reaches out to him there, trying to fix things. Post-Inquisition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_[Night — Some Distance From Weisshaupt]_

Air cold and burning in his lungs, Anders catches up with Hawke’s headlong sprint toward an Inquisition messenger. The dwarf clambers over a crumbling wall, waving a scroll case and losing her footing near the bottom. She sits where she fell, brushing dirt off her breeches and waiting. It doesn’t take them long to reach her.

“Word for you from Skyhold, sers.”

There’s something in the gentle way she turns her case over to a panting Hawke… Anders feels his heart begin to pound. _Hope is not practical_ , that burning, blue-white part of his mind tells him. _It is not actionable._

 _It matters_ , he tells it. _Maker, it’s all we have now._

Justice falls silent. Hawke fumbles the clasp. The moment stretches intolerably but then the scroll is open and gleaming from the light of their staves. Threads of brilliant green come into focus at the magical illumination, spelling out a second message over the first and written in the Inquisitor’s strange canted scrawl. Hawke turns into Anders, embracing him and handing over the scroll. The Fade-script message is short:

> _We welcome Divine Victoria with grate— **Leliana has done it. The circles are shattered permanently. We forge our own futures, now.** —quisition firmly backs the renewa— **Ar lasa mala revas.** —the faithful continue to be welcome in Skyhold as we work to build up what has fallen. Please be advised that—_

Anders starts to laugh and it turns to tears and a lightness he hasn’t felt in years. The scroll crumples in his hand, blurred. It’s hard to stand, but Hawke is there lowering them both to their knees on the fractured stone. Everything had been worth the personal cost, the guilt, the toxic suspicion he’d be the one to end it all…

“We made it,” he whispers. “We’re free.”

In the night-masked ruins, the two mages blast silvery, shimmering, cascading, _exultant_ beams of spirit energy into an unmarred sky. The messenger holds her hands high above her, laughing too, spinning between them in the shower of healing sparks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Anders And Hawke Travel To Skyhold And Cole Tries To Fix Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This second part was inspired by Tumblr user Braginskye's [fanart of Anders and Cole together!](http://braginskye.tumblr.com/post/108061160319/cole-and-anders-meeting-makes-me-very-sad-and-also)

They leave Weisshaupt to its fate and he can’t say he’s sorry to turn his back on it. There are dreams forming in him, golden cracks among Justice’s silver, and none of them begin in this stark place. So he prepares for travel, gathering items from their caches: what will stretch, what they can’t do without. Hawke never remembers healing items or which jars of powdered herbs are needed for which potion. Anders quietly bundles those items and organizes them in special packs. Hawke works on trapping supplies, more familiar with wilderness survival than healing.

Skyhold is a long journey from the Anderfels and they spend much of it trying to remember that they aren’t fugitives any longer. Not really. Hawke only stops sweeping the ground after them with force magic when they reach the ice of the Frostbacks. Anders looks over his shoulder less and less, turning his attention instead to those golden cracks inside, nurturing them. With every Inquisition scout they come across, the cracks grow.

Ice-needled wind claws at his hood, obscuring a flame-and-veilfire torch pattern ahead: one ebon fire, the rest either ruby or eerie dream-blue spiralling out from the black. There are tents and people milling around, he can see that much.

“Inquisition mages,” murmurs Hawke. “Can tell they’re scouts by the ice barrier. Major camps use spirit.”

“Mages as scouts? Might be overkill.”

“I think the Inquisitor is a little jumpy these days. Something to do with temples falling out of the sky and ancient darkspawn. You know how it is. Magic exists to be a pain in the ass.”

Anders pushes him from behind, playful. “It can’t hope to be worse than you.”

“I’m a role model for today’s youth. No idea what you’re on about.”

They pass the mage camp at a respectful distance, Hawke drawing magic into his staff and spinning it. There is a return sweep of light to acknowledge the signal.

And finally, improbably, Skyhold is visible. Small still, but a sheltered beacon crouched in the mountains. He stares at it for a long while, then makes an undignified scamper to catch up to Hawke. The other mage stands on a rise up to his knees in fresh snow.

“Take a look.”

Anders slows down and wades in beside him. 

“This is because of you. This is what stood behind your dream and what stands behind you now.”

On the ice flats far below stretch thousands of tents, campfires flickering like stars on the banks of it. Wind carries the distant roar of a standing army far greater than anything he’s ever seen.

There are no words, so he doesn’t search for them.

They camp on the rise, Anders spending the deepest hours of night watching the troops in silence. Something aches in his throat, kindled by pride and sustained by disbelief. This is what defends his cause, what has freed them for good.

_This is what will never let us be chained again._

\-----

Hawke is careful when they arrive at Skyhold, finding quiet places to walk and shadows to keep to. Even so, there is a ripple that carries news of the Champion’s arrival. To escape it, they find a high vantage and linger there for a time before Hawke heads down to the main hall, taking stairs four at a time.

“I’ll be right back. See if I can’t find some Important People and dissuade Varric from punching you.”

“Please do. I’m worried about the parts he can reach.”

Left comfortably alone under the winter sun, Anders settles down to study the storm of regimented chaos that is Skyhold. The longer he spends cataloguing what he sees, the more his heart threatens to catch in his teeth.

Mages are absolutely everywhere. None of them have the creeping furtiveness he’s spent his life resenting and expecting. They depart the castle on business or enter freely, never stopped by the few templars he’s spotted--

“--they're bickering, studying, laughing. _Living. How many had to die when persuasion didn’t work, peaceful, purposeful, protesting, all of it lost in a fire that burns the sky. I can never ask forgiveness. But so many now live, truly live, it has to be worth it it has to be._ You hurt people, but it... saved many more in the end. And that is good.”

There is a boy rocking on his feet beside him, close enough to touch.

 _Tch. Compassion. Might as well be Futility,_ snaps Justice deep within. _It’s trying to make us distinct again._ But Anders isn’t really listening. There’s a roar in his ears that swallows time.

“You hurt so loudly,” the boy tells him. “But the dead are gone now, you don’t have to hurt in their place. You are you, and you are _good._ ”

 

Hands shake him. Broad hands and a broad face looking up at him, familiar, golden. A laughing face that isn’t laughing now.

“Blondie? Shit. Kid, what did you do?”

“I cracked it open so it would heal.”

“You’re really taking the momentum out of any ball-busting I was going to do, you know that right? Come on Blondie, snap out of it. I’ve had this whole meeting planned and memorized for months and you’re not following the script.”

The sun seems glaring now, flaying off layers of skin to reveal… him, he supposes, and those fragile golden cracks. Justice is icy, distant, and deeply affronted. It’s a strange sensation. Anders looks away from Varric, back down at Skyhold’s courtyard filled with dozens of triumphant lives. There are no words, but he searches for them.

“Will you forgive me?”

Varric lets go and walks away, but turns and comes back to lean on the battlements before getting very far. The ‘kid’ drums an erratic pattern alongside to fill the lengthening silences. Anders clenches his teeth and pulls his cloak closed against the sudden cold, preparing for the anger and hatred he knows is coming. Finally, the dwarf gives a dry chuckle.

“I did a long time ago.”

Anders mentally braces against nothing, loses his footing, strains to know if he’s heard right. There are words, but he’s not the one to say them.

“ _All I had to do was ask,_ ” whispers the boy.


End file.
